


tangled up with you all night

by Nimravidae



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Accidentally sort of, Bed Humping, Bottom Crowley - Freeform, Crowley Is A Pine Tree In Sunglasses, Crowley is a fucking MESS, Flashbacks, Hair Pulling, M/M, Nightmares, Some DS Themes, Top Aziraphale, Voyeurism, lots of fire, tender fucking, wet dreams
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-10-06 03:29:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20500133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nimravidae/pseuds/Nimravidae
Summary: If dreams were what humans said, manifestations of your worst desires and your greatest fears, then what would he ever dream of but Aziraphale?Crowley was certain he’d dream of Aziraphale until the end of days and, well, he was very nearly right.(AKA Crowley gets busted humping his bed after a wet dream. Fucking ensues.)





	tangled up with you all night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [leaveanote](https://archiveofourown.org/users/leaveanote/gifts).

> Exactly what it says on the tin. I recommend listening to "Every Other Freckle" by Alt-J on repeat if you want to know what it was like inside my head as I wrote this.
> 
> yes the title of from a Taylor Swift song (Wildest Dreams), yes I think it's very funny.
> 
> Dedicated to Sof: You know why. I adore you and I heart you.

Crowley learned most of his human traits from watching. Watch them to learn how to hold yourself, how to walk, speak, interact. A constantly-shifting system of intricate social ritual. Watch them to know how to dress, when to stop bowing, when to stop kissing knuckles and cheeks and when to stop accessorizing with canes and top hats. 

When it’s acceptable to touch, when it’s not. (Even when you want to)

He could learn quite a bit from watching—at least, he could learn what it meant to _look _like a human. To carry the appearances of one. His refrigerator was never plugged in, but it still kept his food cold because he’s only ever seen them do that. His stereo plays music because it ought to. His phone never dies, his car never runs out of petrol because why would they ever? 

There were some things you couldn’t learn from watching. How to digest, how to swallow down something and let it sit in your stomach, churning with acid and bile. How electricity works, how car engines spark and combust, how dreams should look. 

What they really are.

As far as Crowley was concerned, dreams were exactly as stories, film, and television told him. Technicolor reality replaying your deepest desires and fears.

Which explains why his dreams where often the way they were. 

The first time he slept was just after he first learned what nightmares were. Somewhere around 156AD — it was all smoke. Smoke and pitch and tar and ash, coating his lungs and gritting against his teeth as he tried to scream but his voice never came. He didn’t know what he wanted, what he was screaming for as his wings stretched out before him but no—no it wasn’t his fall, there were angels shattered on the pavement around him but this wasn’t the Fall, it wasn’t the War. It wasn’t the holy-fire stench of flaming swords and golden blood staining black against the rotten grounds of the belly of Hell.

It was Rome, it was 64AD again. He was screaming, screaming for something—for someone. Everything moved with the beat of a heart he always forgot to let pound in his chest. The breath he never needed froze, thick with a pain he could never put into words. 

There, in the middle of the Circus Maximums, wings flame-greyed and half-burned. _No. (Run, run run to him. Pick him up, get him out of here get him out of here get him _out of here_.) _He couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe.

Golden blood turning black, blaze-white crumbling, saltbright hair stained with soot and coal and empty eyes turning towards the burning skies—watching as the stars fell with burning wings.

When he jerked awake, fingers knotted in his own hair, Crowley thought that, perhaps, sleeping wasn’t for him. 

The next time he tried was a few centuries later (after Aziraphale had popped back into his life, once again with the burning-white that was almost too hard to look at, the sort that burned the back of his lids and seared his image onto the back of his tongue. Blaze-blue eyes burning out a put-upon rage when Crowley managed to get his hands on Attila after the Mincio River. Crowley still swears he would’ve reduced Rome to rubble if the drink hadn’t done him in.) 

He’d just wanted time, a few moments where he wasn’t counting the feathers behind Aziraphale’s head, making sure they were all there, not wincing whenever the threat of candle-light burned itself across Aziraphale’s cheeks, cutting shadows with the point of his nose and the rise of his lip. 

It glimmered away in his eyes, like burning wax under the waves of the Icarian Sea. 

A couple days, a few weeks, a few hours, a few years maybe. To catch the ragged breath that stung his throat like the ghost of Rome’s ashes. 

He fell asleep somewhere around 500—his mind carrying him back to Rome again. Before it burned, before Nero, before the Huns and the Vandals. 

That time, it was oysters. It was Aziraphale spread atop the table in Patronius’. It was flesh sea-sweet on Crowley’s tongue, it was salt-soft and ocean-rich as Crowley swallowed him down. Lips on skin on skin on skin, it was the taste of Aziraphale, the feel of him twitching and flexing, splitting Crowley’s lips. The smell of him (_sand-salt and electric undercurrents and fire and power, all radiating. He could break you, he could push himself from the table and smite you, he could shatter you to atoms and knit you back together with nothing but the golden-grace of himself between your veins. He could unmake you, he could re-make you. He could tear you to pieces.) _

Aziraphale arched off the table, Crowley woke hard and aching and thought maybe sleeping actually was his sort of thing. 

He didn’t always recall his dreams, he wasn’t supposed to, was he? That’s what humans knew about their dreams, that was what they told him. Sometimes you recall them, sometimes you don’t. So sometimes Crowley remembered what he dreamed, sometimes he didn’t. If he wanted to, he could play them back in perfect recollection—but he didn’t because that wasn’t what dreams were for. Because that wasn’t how they worked and thus, that wasn’t how Crowley’s worked. 

Humans said you can’t control your dreams, so Crowley couldn’t do that either. 

He slept on and off since then, dreamed on and off. He dreamed about floods, about reaching beneath the waves, he dreamed about the hot springs he visited once, he dreamed about Aziraphale in them, pressing their bodies together and searching out the soft lines of him. He dreamed of the stretch of his throat and the stench of lava-rock cooling in Pompeii as Aziraphale clung to his shoulder in grief. 

It was Aziraphale above him, pinning his wrists to the sweet-soil of Eden and pressing his lips to the line of his throat, it was Crowley’s voice screeching until it shattered as he lost Aziraphale in the whip-wild flames of Antioch. Aziraphale on his knees, Crowley on his — fingers in hair and hands on bodies and lips and lips and lips. 

Dreams that Crowley awoke from with sweat-stained sheets (demons didn’t sweat, he didn’t burn with the same blue-flame intensity as humans did, he didn’t reach a fever-pitch in the middle of the night, but he still woke up with a slick brow and sticky pants)

It became a give and take—a barter with his subconscious. He’ll exchange recollections of the horrors of existence for just a moment of fantasy. Show him the wrong of his ways, show him the blood that spreads from his hands, that stains the core of his Essence, that drips from the ends of his hair—remind him of every weight he wears, just for one night to pretend. To _dream _of gripping close to something he can never have, to hold fast to Aziraphale and rock together and whisper all the things that choke in his throat. 

He’ll suffer all the slings and arrows of whatever it was his mind asked of him, just for one night of what he’d never admit he needed. A trade, an exchange, a fair punishment for spending his evenings grinding off against his hand with a name on his tongue he refuses to let spill over for fear of making it real.

If dreams were what humans said, manifestations of your worst desires and your greatest fears, then what would he ever dream of _but _Aziraphale? 

Crowley was certain he’d dream of Aziraphale until the end of days and, well, he was very nearly right. He hadn’t really anticipated dreaming of him beyond that. He hadn’t anticipated dreaming of _anything. _

But the world didn’t end, at least not really. They averted the apocalypse, they thwarted Heaven and Hell, they carried on. 

There was, of course, some differences. That night, with the shiver of antichrist magic thick in the air London (and the whole world, really) blinking itself awake and asleep at once, Crowley hadn’t slept. In his sparse-full Mayfair flat, he’d sat and sulked and watched Aziraphale wring his fingers about a prophecy that Crowley couldn’t make heads or tails of. Too exhausted to think, too exhausted to sleep. 

For the best, he wasn’t sure what sort of dreams he’d have in that state and really, he wasn’t sure he was too keen on finding out. 

Instead he watched. He was always good at that, always good at watching. Watching Aziraphale’s worried mouth, watching the wine bottles slowly drain, watching the twist of Aziraphale’s fingers, the line of his throat, the curve of his ear, the flick of his nervous tongue. 

Watching as Aziraphale reached his conclusion, watching as he explained what they _must _do. 

The thing about Crowley’s dreams was that they tended more towards vagueness. Towards things he knew. Crowley didn’t know what Aziraphale tasted like, he didn’t know the salt-sugar of his throat, the sea-sick taste of the space between his fingers or the juncture of his throat. He imagined he tasted like oysters, like the grit-salt of Eden and the first rain. He imagined his skin felt the same under his teeth as the flesh of an apple. 

Something to dig his teeth into, to catch and burst with sweet and sugar—bruises like pears and peaches. He’d seen humans bruise each other ‘round the throat with nothing but teeth and tongue and lips. From that moment on, it played party to quite a few of his dreams. 

But Crowley couldn’t—he didn’t _know _what it felt like. There had been no experimentation, no taste of human flesh under his tongue. His dreams promised him Aziraphale, and what would ever measure? But, of course, his dreams could only carry him so far. 

He knew what his hand felt like covering his elbow, what his shoulder felt like gently bumping against Crowley’s arm. But it was no replacement for the curious sensation of lips over lips, for what Aziraphale might feel like flush against him, aching and hard. 

He couldn’t imagine it until—well, until he could. Until they realized the only way to thwart Heaven and Hell was in each other’s bodies. 

Crowley had wanted to sleep in it, to take Aziraphale’s body to bed and spread him over the sheets and luxuriate in the way silk must feel against his skin. Roll him in it, know what he feels like under the press of hands, know what it feels like to push two fingers past his lips into velvet-fire heat and feel that tongue pushing against them. He wanted to know what it was like to drag hands up the soft-sensitive inside of his thighs (he knew they’d be sensitive, he looked so much like someone who would shiver and shudder with the whisper of kisses and the promise of teeth)

He wanted to know what it was like to dream in Aziraphale’s body, to wrap his arms around him sleep buried in his touch. 

But there wasn’t time to waste, there wasn’t time to explore, time to sleep—Heaven nabbed, he spit fire at angels and tried not to breathe too deep the stench of Heaven and Hellfire _(things that reminded him too much of the War, things that reminded him too much of nightmares)_

Crowley only allowed himself the briefest of indulgences. Liberties. He was a demon after all, not built on a parapet of self-control. He took a hand smoothed over his cheek, fingers knotted in his hair _(just the smallest tug, just enough to wrench a whimper in this voice and oh—oh someone what a whimper it was. To hear it on Aziraphale’s lips, a high-caught gasp somewhere in his throat, it was almost too much right then. Crowley pretended like he couldn’t feel the heat-stir in his stomach, pretended like he didn’t feel Aziraphale’s cock in _his _trousers. Too far, too much, too far) _a hand smoothing over the rise of his neck, wondering what it would taste like, wondering what noises he would make if Crowley set his teeth to it. 

They switched back, got dinner, and Crowley promptly put himself to bed. 

Technicolor reality, like a film made just for him of all the wretched things he wanted to do. 

He took to sleeping as much as he could. Usually just a night, a few times a week. He’d drink in Aziraphale’s presence, he’d commit parts of him to memory, the way he turned his nose up at a particular story, the way he glanced over (furtively, no longer looking up at Heaven, now he’d look to Crowley. Glance aside, when he thought he wasn’t watching. Like Crowley couldn’t feel the steady sinking of lake-water eyes swallowing him whole, like he didn’t already know the ache of the living things that tangle under the gaze, catching him in the reeds and pulling him under.) 

Crowley took careful note, watching every moment, every flex of muscle under clothing and twist of fabric and how his shoulders moved and the wiggle trailed down his arms to his elbows to his wrists and his fingers. The way that he shifted closer, making Crowley’s heart hammer away in his want-knotted throat. 

Sometimes he slept for days at a time. That was after there was whiskey and wine (whiskey first, because it burned off the straps that held Crowley down, because too much and he knew he would snap them, one glass too many and he would flood, he would do something reckless, something stupid, something to ruin what he carefully carved out of six thousand years. He would bring down the house they build on a tenuous understanding of what _can _and _cannot _happen.) 

After they drank in the backroom of the bookshop, after there was drunken tongues twisting over things unsaid, after there was Aziraphale moving — too close on the sofa. They never sat on the same sofa, they never sat so close. Crowley liked to lounge, he liked to spread his sharp-edged limbs, cast cold shadows over himself, show the sharp points, show the sharp edges, show the deadly cuts he could be making deep in Aziraphale’s flesh. Like a false-predator flexing their physiological similarities but—but Crowley was _real. _

His heart pounded it out when Aziraphale’s hand rested on the back of the sofa, palm-up, like an offering, exposing the soft underbelly of himself, like he didn’t know there was a snake lurking in the undergrass. _I’ll tear you down, I’ll tear you apart please stop coming so close. Your knee is almost touching mine I can feel it, feel the heat radiating off you and I know how how that body is now, oh dear someone I know how hot that body is. I felt it from inside you, I felt it when I was _inside _you. The fire and fury rolling off your skin. I felt the power the underlaces everything you do. The whip-wild strength and the wildfire power that buzzes through you. I can feel it, I can feel it when you lean into me, when your fingers brush the edge of my sleeves — please stop, please I can’t take it anymore, I can’t — you’re going to shatter me, you’re going to break me— _

He’d part his lips, he’d take in a breath of it all—the underlined dust of the bookshop, the holy-fizzle energy of too many miracles in one place, the nutmeg and cinnamon that always clung to the corners of Aziraphale’s cologne—something that in and of itself was always a bit spicy, always a bit warm, always the curl-close enticing of a late autumn day. Crowley wanted to curl in it, catching another whiff with snake-sharp senses as Aziraphale leaned closer, his wrist, his pulse-point, all of him too close, too much in Crowley’s space, those frozen-lake eyes flickering down, for just a moment.

If Crowley was cocky enough, if he was sure enough, if he was self-involved, presumptuous, he would dare, _dare, _do something more than just fantasize that Aziraphale was staring at his lips. 

After nights like those, he’d send a note. 

_Sleeping for a few days. Don’t worry. - C. _

And he’d let his dreams take over. 

It had been one of those nights, one with too much whiskey first, a glass too many where Crowley dared lean back in, where he tested the waters of his fingers brushing—faux-innocent, faux-accidental—against Aziraphale’s as he handed him another glass. The sort of night with Aziraphale’s cheek resting on the skewer-point of Crowley’s shoulder, the place where it must be uncomfortable, where it bites into the flesh of his cheek and the dangerous nearness to his throat, his heart. 

Where Crowley could bury his fingers into his bed linen hair and feel it (_you know what it feels like already, you know what it feels like under fingers, what it feels like to card through it and touch him like this. He doesn’t know you know, he can never know you know) _

He didn’t—he couldn’t—he wouldn’t. That would be carefully listed under the reckless things that would ruin them, the things he couldn’t do for fear of retribution. Not that _that _was something Crowley shied from. Whether or not it played party to a number of those dreams was between himself, his hand, and this bedroom walls. 

Breathe in Aziraphale’s scent—then out from the lungs, expelling it from the body, banish it back into the atmosphere like the cigarette smoke he’d much rather have been inhaling in that moment. Turn to atoms and vanish, on nothing. 

Another breath and it was back. His fingers had twitched and Aziraphale at clicked his tongue. “No smoking in the shop, we agreed.” 

Right. They agreed. They agreed for good reason. If Crowley breathed hard enough, it all tasted like fire, it tasted like smoke and sand and Hellfire and sulfur and the burnblack of charred feathers and the ache of grief and the salt of himself. Adam could put the shop back, but he couldn’t make Crowley _forget. _

Antioch and Rome. The War and the Fall. 

The bookshop. 

“Let’s not think about it,” Aziraphale had said, brazen hand sweeping up to hold onto Crowley’s other shoulder, arm caging in his wayward heart against his chest. Drunk. He was drunk. He was drunk as he pushed his face into Crowley’s throat and hummed out some nonsense bar. “Tell me about your day.”

But it was skin and breath and lips just a hair's breadth from his throat and Crowley’s mind couldn’t offer anything. Nothing but the ache of what it was like to be so close, so close indeed. All Crowley could do, think, smell, see, breathe, was Aziraphale. Aziraphale. Aziraphale. 

His lips parted and he turned his eyes back down to him _(idiot idiot not wearing your fucking sunglasses. They’re on the table you absolute moron, you fucking idiot. Why aren’t you wearing them, he can see you stare, he can see you watch him) _

It wormed its way up his throat, sticking to the back of his teeth and—and he wanted to say it he needed to say it. It choked him, it curled between the split of his tongue, pushing against his fangs and incisors. Coating his mouth like ash and blood. Eyes _too close too close too close _blink up at him and all Crowley could see was is own want reflected back in the oceanbright blue of them. 

_I am going to do something stupid, _he thought. _Please, don’t let me ruin this, don’t let me kiss you. _

Aziraphale twitched forward and Crowley recoiled back—a bowstring finally pulled too tight, snapping against the arm of the wayward archer. He tore his hands, his body, his legs away, scrambling back over the arm of the sofa and landing awkwardly back on his own two feet. “I have to—” He didn’t finish the sentence. 

He didn’t send note. 

He didn’t even stop to collect his car (she’ll be waiting for him outside his flat, like she always is). He pushed his way out of the shop, ignoring the worried sounds of protest behind him. _Idiot—idiot. You fucking moron how could you almost—how could you almost be so fucking stupid. What is wrong with you? You were good for six thousand years, you didn’t do anything so reckless, so fucking stupid. This is what you get, this is why you can’t have anything like this. You can’t keep him, you’ll ruin him. You’ll ruin this like you’ve ruined everything. _

Two steps outside and, in a blink, he was at his apartment—drunken mis-guided wrath and rage pulling at his clothes until he could fall, nude, into his sheets. 

It had been one of those nights. That leads to dreams like these.

A cobbled together mess of the bookshop and the Mayfair flat—with Crowley’s hard-lined tables and Aziraphale’s warm lighting. With Crowley sprawled over and fever-press lips on skin and skin and skin. With hands and flesh and bodies curling together. 

_Please, _he says, voice inaudible over the rushing of the blood in his ears. 

Aziraphale, blaze-white and saltbright, above him bites at the juncture of neck and throat. _Please what? _

_Please take me, have me, make me scream. _

Hands skate down his chest and legs and stomach and arms—too many hands and not enough at once, a sensation swarming over him again and again and again and again as the table becomes the floor and the bed and the sofa in the bookshop and Crowley’s fingers tangle in hair that feels like silk and wrench his lips to his own. 

Aziraphale never kisses him in his dreams, he never goes so far (Crowley wouldn’t know how it would feel, the electric-fire of a flamesword tongue pushing past his teeth, how it would feel to be tasted, to be claimed, to have as much of Aziraphale inside himself as possible) 

He does fuck him though. He fucks him in the way it feels like Crowley’s fingers—the needpress of three deep inside himself, pretending like it was anything but his own fingers, pretending like it was Aziraphale’s, pretending like it _was him. _Like it was Azirapahle fuckdeep inside him, hunched over his back and teeth at his neck and fingers in his hair. 

The dream is a hundred things at once, it’s the way he smells, wrapped around him, it’s Crowley on his knees, on his back, on his belly being spread open and rent apart atom by atom until there was nothing but dust and ash left to fuck in his wake. It was Aziraphale’s voice, crooning out behind him, _that’s it, yes my dear boy just like that. So good for me, go on, keep going. You take me so well, you know me so well — just what I want, go on, yes, yes, yes, yes. _

It’s the scent of him, like Crowley could taste the saltsweet of his throat, could drag his tongue across the pale flesh he felt flexing under fingers that weren’t his—the oyster-salt of him, the sea-sick sweetness that Crowley would chase like it was everything he could have ever wanted. He could nose along Aziraphale’s throat, find the pulse-point, the place on the muscle where he knows he’ll feel it, drag his tongue, taste, and taste, and _bite. _

The fucksweat of it, the smell of sex and sin and holy fire power. 

It’s tender and rough at once, it’s a motley assortment of sensation, of fire and ice and frozen wastelands and burning touches. It’s Aziraphale, his tender-handed and soft-eyed angel with worry-lips and thighs spread waiting to be consumed. It’s Aziraphale, the Principality, with his flaming sword fury and the lightning-crack power of Heaven behind him, wrenching Crowley’s head back by the hair and tearing him apart feather by feather with nothing but his teeth. 

He burns with it, stomach churning over the smoldering wreckage of the saltruin of Carthage—it consumes him. Nothing but fire and fire and fire, starting in the tinderbox of his stomach, catching on his charcloth chest and working its way outwards until it’s all he is is fire. Fire. Fire. Burning himself to the point between asleep and awake where Aziraphale’s back is the silk of his sheets and the throat his teeth search for is made of feathers and cloth. 

The body he grinds down against is silk bedding. 

If he keeps his eyes clenched he can chase it, hips pushing down against the bed (Aziraphale’s thigh, bracketed by his own grinding off as his groans low in Crowley’s ear, _that’s right, right there, go on — show me how you come, I want to make you come until all you know is my name, that’s it. Show me) _

Fuck, fuck. He slides his knee up, hips working over his bed, cock sliding between the liquid silk, chasing that hint of friction and pressure and pressure and fuck-fuck. He hisses and the fabric of his pillow tears under his canines, shredding as he presses his face down harder, fingers stretching to fist in his own hair and _pull. _

He’s wrapped up in it, in the velvet-smooth and cool heat of it all — swallowed whole by the waves of his bedsheets, consumed by the feeling of (of Aziraphale, of his satin-smooth thighs and skin and throat) everything choking, constricting him as he pushes harder. 

_Aziraphale, yes. _He can still feel him, the ghost of dream-fingers deep inside him, the ghost of a magma-hot firemouth sucking hot bruises along the column of his throat. _Aziraphale, please please more. _

More he wants, he needs, he _burns _for. 

He can’t adhere to one narrative, to one thought, one position, his free hand pulling himself closer to his bed, grinding harder down against it, chasing the ruination he can feel burning under the slow crawl of his flesh. All of him is made of ash and smoke, he can’t be made of flesh and bone anymore — it’s too much to be a physical form, too much to be anything but the salt and charred wood. But he has to be— 

He has to be physical, corporeal, because he can _feel_ Aziraphale’s hands, can feel teeth and tongue and oh _fuck Aziraphale please please. _

His eyes squeeze shut as he feels that bubble of shame start to swell just behind the impending end, he can’t—he can’t focus on it when there in the flashes of his mind, there in this space between _here _and _there _where it’s nothing but images of them. Of Aziraphale’s thighs wrapped around his face as he sucks him down, as he pushes his tongue against him, as he dips his head and _consumes _him from the inside out. Slithering his tongue inside him and tasting and taking and having. 

_More, deeper, harder. _

Crowley writhes, teeth gritting around the fabric between his teeth, twisting his fingers at the roots of his own hair (it’s not the same, it’s not the same as being pulled, as being showed, as being moved and manipulated in just the right way. Not the same as being yanked back, as being _exposed, _as a hand smoothing over his throat, lips, teeth, tongue, _Aziraphale Aziraphale Aziraphale Aziraphale) _

Fuck — he needs. It coils, hot and red and frozen low in his stomach, he can feel the sheets slicksticky, his flushed, aching cock sliding between them as he fucks himself down against the bed again and again, _Aziraphale, Azirapahle, please, please, I need you, I need you right now, please I need you, please. _

He lets the saliva-sodden fabric drop from his lips and grips tighter, at himself, at the bed, eyes squeezing shut as sweat slicks down his back and his feet kick to get a better position, better grip to just—so close, so close just— 

_Crowley_

That’s right—say his name, beg it, plead it, tell him how good he is, tell him how much you need him, tell him how much you want this, tell him how good he is—_Crowley—_just like that, he needs it, he needs it so much _Aziraphale Aziraphale, I need you, I need you now, Aziraphale— _

_“Crowley.” _

All at once, the fires of history and the fires of his mind, freeze. He won’t open his eyes, he won’t open his eyes because that wasn’t Aziraphale’s voice rattling around in his mind, it wasn’t his voice curling like smoke around him—a half-memory half-fantasy recorded on the back of his tongue and re-played until it burned out. 

“Crowley, I swear if you turn into a _snake _right now_—” _

Well he was considering it. 

“Look at me.” There are moments where Crowley remembers what Aziraphale is. Where he remembers that She doesn’t give anyone flaming swords, or puts them on gates to guard Eden. That Principalities are made of steel and flint. Aziraphale is, and has always been, a force to be reckoned with. He could level cities, he could turn London to salt and dust. Those hands, those hands he’d just imagined cradling his cheeks could tear his Essence from his body with little more than a flick of his wrist. 

He could shatter Crowley into dust and feathers. 

There are moments he remembers this, moments he remembers what it felt like to be in the body of a Principality, to feel what it meant to be made of metal and bone again. 

That tone, _look at me, _the sort that meant _do it now, look at me or so help me, Crowley, I will make you. _Those are the moments that remind him. 

Slowly, he opens an eye to him. He tries not to think about how he looks, about how debauched, how exposed, how vulnerable. _He could be spread out beneath him, underbelly and throat bared to that blade and it wouldn’t be as bad as this. It wouldn’t feel the same. Crowley would take being on his back with a sword under his chin to this a hundred times over. _

Aziraphale is standing there, in the open doorway to Crowley’s bedroom, his hands clasped in front of his middle, his cheeks painted with a red-rock flush. 

He looks at him, like he was told to do. 

“Is this...what you do, when you sleep?” Aziraphale asks, stepping forward. Every muscle, every bone, in Crowley’s body wants to pull back. He doesn’t, and he must still be dreaming. He blinks once, then twice. 

He has to be dreaming. 

“I—well—” His throat is desert-parched, dry and cracked like the moments before the first rainstorm washed over Eden. 

“Sometimes? And you think of—me?” Neither of those are a question. Crowley nods anyway. He doesn’t look away, his cock hasn’t softened—instead that voice, firm-edged and steelbone sharp under a pretense of softness, it makes him _ache. _

“Tell me.” This time, it absolutely is not a question. It rings across the empty spaces in Crowley’s flat, it echoes against the sharp edges and corners, singing back right across the flush that darkens the bridge of his nose and the space over his cheeks. He gestures out, as if Crowley’s current position was a dessert cart, waiting for Aziraphale to pluck something up to try, to taste. 

“Tell me how you do this. Tell me what you think about.” Another step forward. “Tell me how you touch yourself when you think of me.” There is a beat, a pause, as the bed dips under Aziraphale’s weight, as he sits, prim and perfect, right on the edge. Right where he can watch. “If you like, of course.” 

He’s dreaming. That is the only explanation is that he is still dreaming. Swallowing his river-rock heart, Crowley lowers his forehead back to the pillow—Aziraphale not chiding him this time. But he can feel the weight of the icepress of his eyes. The cool riverwater wash down the length of his back, the drag of him down.

Crowley wrangles for his voice, feeling the moments ticking down to nothing around him. He has to say something, has to conjure something to say—anything besides the things currently ricocheting in his anxiety-wrung mind. He chokes, in the last moment, as Aziraphale clicks his tongue. 

“Well, dear boy? Would you like to show me instead?”

Dreaming. He’s dreaming. Caught in the waterways of unconsciousness, he pushes his hips back down against the bed with a barely suppressed whimper. 

“That’s it,” Aziraphale breathes, fabric rustling—Crowley’s eyes are shut again, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. There’s no flesh-on-flesh sound of him stroking himself off, there’s no slick slide of hands, just the sound of something being set side and Aziraphale’s lips pressing together in a low, content hum. Something that boils, _boils, _under Crowley’s skin. 

“Tell me what you were thinking about.”

“Dreaming,” he manages, choking up the words like dust as his face turns a mottled wine. “I was dreaming.”

“Quite the same as thinking, isn’t it?” 

Crowley’s throat can’t argue with that logic, so it closes instead, wrapping around a loosely formed whine as he bucks his hips down desperately again. “Thinking about you, then. Dreaming about you. Your hands in my—in my hair.”

The bed creaks as Aziraphale moves, and oh—oh. A gentle hand detangles Crowley’s fingers in his firepitch hair and buries there instead. Soft, gentle. But Crowley knows what lies beneath, he knows the rage and fury of angels, he knows what Aziraphale is capable of, what he could do. His chest seizes around the thought, flooding him with all the molten rock rush of magma. Cool in his lungs, choke him out. 

“Like this?” His fingers card through and Crowley wants to say yes _yes yes I have. I’ve thought about you like this, I’ve thought about how your fingers would feel in my hair, about how my cheek would feel pillowed on your chest. I’ve thought about the post-fuck lying there, the sweat we don’t need cooling on our brows the way people do. I thought about the post-orgasm muscle-twitch, the way you might shiver in the overstimulation when I ghost my fingers up your thighs, when I kiss the rise of your throat. How I might feel when I push the bruises you left on my neck and feel the saltsharp sensation of your teeth at me again. _

“Like—” And Aziraphale _pulls. _

The noise Crowley makes wrenches from the pits of his being, from the echoing caverns where he’s hidden all of this for so long. From the places where six thousand years of needing and wanting and needing and wanting have made themselves home in the frostbitten nothingness where he pretended all was well. 

This is a dream, this is a _nightmare. _This is a nightmare and Crowley is waiting for the walls to crumble to ash because his nightmares are always on fire. Because the walls of the Mayfair flat will fall away and there will be Rome and Carthage and Antioch and the wide barren plains of Hell stretched out before him. Because Aziraphale is _here _and it feels so _real. _

_Real. _

“Please,” he gasps, toes curling as he chases his orgasm with undulating hips against a far-too giving mattress. “Please.” 

“Please what, dear? Is this—would you like me to stop?”

There’s worrypress to his words that Crowley wants to swallow, he wants to turn and push their lips together and take every concerned breath from those lungs and breath back nothing but affirmations into him. _Yes I want this, I never want you to stop, I’ve wanted this, I’ve wanted you from the moment I saw you — lit by the sun I hung in the sky myself. I never thought the light I molded into the sky would ever touch anything as beautiful as you, I never thought I could be blessed again until I saw you, shiverwhite in the edges of the Eden sun. I never thought beauty was something I would be allowed to hold. Please don’t stop, you can’t stop. _

What he says, choked out from his lungs, is, “Don’t you _dare.” _

“Then, Crowley,” Aziraphale breathes. “Keep telling me what you want.” 

Fuck. _Fuck. _Kiss him, that’s what he wants. Kiss him (_Don’t kiss him, kiss him and he’ll know it’s not real. He’ll know when you can’t kiss him, he’ll know when it doesn’t work when he can’t imagine the press of lips against his own. He’ll know it was all a dream then) _Kiss him, please, dear someone kiss him (_don’t you dare ask, don’t you dare ask). _

“I want you, fuck, Aziraphale—I want you.” His hips stop, pressed hard against the bed—his impending end thrumming away somewhere back between his stomach and his spine. “I want you, I want you—I’ve _wanted _you for six thousand _fucking _years.”

Much like the charmarked pillars buckling under the endless weight of age and decay, Crowley’s arms give, sending him down to his elbows on the bed. “I’ve wanted you since the moment I first _saw _you—you were standing on the wall and I was, I was a snake and I wanted to—I _wanted _you, I haven’t stopped wanting you. Six thousand years, you’ve been in every dream, every thought I haven’t—”

The hand falls from his hair and that’s it. He’s going to wake up, wrenched from this fucking nightmare once and for all and wake up with his pillow drenched in saltwater. 

“Darling.” Aziraphale’s hand falls to the nape of his neck, thumb working fevered circles there. “It’s alright, you’re alright. This is—well,” there’s a cough behind him. “I wasn’t clear, was I? This is _very _mutual.” 

His eyes squeeze shut as he tries to push himself back up, tries to roll his body out to force himself from his dream, from where he hears those words he wants, those words he _needs _echoed in Aziraphale’s voice. He’d rather dream of Hell, he’d rather dream of the Fall. He’d take the roof collapsing overhead in the Persepolis again, he’d take the ash-clogged streets of Rome with the sound of Nero’s fiddle. 

He’d take anything, anything but this. Anything but Aziraphale’s hand running down the length of his back as he leans in. “Crowley.” The edges of his voice are rounded. Softer. There’s no less steel beneath it but it’s wrapped in the softness of affection that Crowley doesn’t want to hear. For a moment, he tastes apples, a half-familiar flavor bursting over his tongue as he tries to swallow what he doesn’t want to know. 

“Crowley, it’s alright. Look at me, dear.” 

In the shadow of himself, one slitted bile-yellow eye opens. A hand cups his cheek, his jaw, his chin. 

“There we go. Roll over, dear.” And he does, sheets draped around himself, pooling as he adjusts himself so he’s lying on his back, blinking up at Aziraphale above him. Silk settles between his legs, hiding his half-flagged cock and the flush of shame that cuts itself down his body. 

Aziraphale had stripped off his jacket and his waistcoat at some point, leaving them out of Crowley’s line of sight (folded, likely, he likes his things folded neatly. Pressed into order. The proper place). His sleeves rolled up exposing just a few more inches of those strong forearms, of the dotted freckles and the softwarm hairs that line up to his elbow. 

“Gorgeous,” he mutters because he’s dreaming and what does it matter what he says in his dreams. _Gorgeous, _he could say. _Beautiful, like you were carved from everything just for me. The most gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen. Something beautiful, something indescribable. _

Maybe he says them all, maybe he doesn’t. It doesn’t matter because he’s dreaming. Because he’s asleep because he has to be asleep—that’s the only explanation. Still asleep, still wrapped in his sheets. 

The only way he can feel Aziraphale’s fingers, the perfect heat of them cupping his jaw, the swipe of a broad thumb over his lower lip. “You say such lovely things,” Aziraphale says, voice hardly above a breath. 

“S’true,” Crowley mumbles back, turning his head just enough. 

“We’ve gone a bit, er, well we’ve gone a bit far already, but I still really feel I ought to ask. May I kiss you?” He asks, and Crowley’s stomach churns around it.

_No, no you may not. _Please, please, please kiss me. _Don’t kiss me, I’ll wake up. _Please, I need to feel your lips on mine, teeth and tongue. _No. _Yes. 

“I—”

“It’s only if you like.” 

He’d like, he’d like so much. He’s been dreaming about it, _dreaming _about it for six thousand years. It’s been the only thing on his mind, what those lips would taste like but he wouldn’t dare imagine it. He wouldn’t dare let himself wander through that copse of thoughts, through where those pine trees loom above him, laden down with _what-if _and _but-maybe_ and everywhere in between. He’d be lost in them forever if he dared think about what the inside of Aziraphale’s mouth tasted like. 

He didn’t dare wonder _(like whiskey and apples and wine)_

Halting, nervous-shiver fingers reach out to Aziraphale’s cheek, smoothing his thin palm over his cheek. He’d done it before with Aziraphale’s hands, he’d touched his face and his jaw and his neck, trying to memorize the soft curves of his body with a borrowed touch. It’s different with Crowley’s fingers, it’s different and better and worse and different. It’s different and it can’t be different because this is a dream and this is dream and this is a dream.

Aziraphale braces himself with one hand on the other side of Crowley’s head, leaning forward and this is a dream. There is no way Crowley could know what Aziraphale’s jaw feels like under his boney fingers, what every angle feels like as he pushes them into his hair. He knew what it felt like, pillow soft and downy under the borrowed touch. It was soft against soft fingers and soft palms—he didn’t know his hair would be so soft under his own hellrough touch. 

There’s no way because he hasn’t ever done this. He hasn’t ever curled his fingers around the back of Aziraphale’s scalp, he hasn’t cradled his head and given the faintest pull forward, he hasn’t tilted his head and watched the lids close on those lifewater eyes. 

He’s never kissed Azirapahle, he shouldn’t be able to feel this. The soft give of lips against his own, the feeling of his heart tongue his tongue and his pulse shuddering to a stop and his eyes slide closed to be lost, entirely, utterly lost, in the sensation. 

It is, entirely possible, that Crowley might not be dreaming. 

Aziraphale slides over, pushing with more collected urgency against Crowley’s mouth as he brackets his narrow hips with those thighs (_the thighs Crowley can’t stop thinking about, the ones he wants to taste, bruise, bite, imprint his mark onto until every inch of him screams Crowley’s name). _He teases, just a touch, with his tongue—and Crowley yield to him like it was all he was ever made to do. 

_(He was made for the opposite, he was made to resist, he was made to rebel against Heaven and all of its Angels— but not this one. Never this one. He’d bend for Aziraphale, he’d break for him. He’d do anything he asked. He proved it, didn’t he? He proved it in Rome, in the Globe, in the Bastille, in Tadfield. Ask me and I’ll do it ask me and I’ll do anything. I’ll shuck off Hell, I’ll throw myself onto your flaming sword. I’ll repent—just ask me and I’ll do it.)_

Crowley lets Aziraphale taste him, he urges him down until they’re flush together—nothing between them but silk and cotton. Which Crowley quickly makes work of, pushing it off Aziraphale’s shoulders as Aziraphale pulls back just enough to shuck the shirt off (Crowley snaps and it’s folded, Aziraphale doesn’t always have to ask. Not if Crowley already knows)

“Tell me,” Aziraphale says, his kiss-wine mouth sliding slick against Crowley’s shell-shocked lips. “What were you dreaming of?”

His eyes can barely flutter open, stealing presses of lips to lips to revel in the sensation, in the taste of Aziraphale (_the only way he can describe it. Aziraphale. He tastes like the last sunset in Eden, like the first rainless dawn over Mesopotamia, like the lilies that bloomed and the throatcracking joy of being around him) _

“Your. Your mouth, your legs. I was—” He swallows, breathless, and kisses him again because he has to. Because you can’t do this once and never again. Kissing him is going to haunt him, it’s going to settle somewhere between his throat and his teeth and he’ll only ever want to do it again. Fuck everything else, fuck the world around them. All he wants is to kiss Aziraphale, kiss him and kiss him and kiss him. 

Aziraphale pulls back, a steadying hand on Crowley’s chest. “You were what?”

“Grinding off on you. On your leg. While you told me—how—how I was—” _How good I was. While you told me I was good, while you pulled your hair and told me I was beautiful and brilliant and good. _

Without him saying it, the message seems to filter across, it seems pressed in the high-caught whimper of Crowley’s voice as Aziraphale gives his hair another sharp tug. It’s in the way that Crowley shivers as Aziraphale slides a hand up his leg. The way he mouths his breathless _yes, yes, don’t fucking stop _into Aziraphale’s neck. 

And Aziraphale doesn’t fucking stop. 

His fingers feel the same and different, thick and hot and perfect as they spread Crowley open slowly. Maybe it’s the same and maybe it’s different because Aziraphale sucks hotwet bruises into the space under his jaw and down the line of his throat to his collar as he twists three-fingers deep into Crowley. Maybe it’s different when he wrenches Crowley’s face against his throat, growling _bite _against his ear. 

Maybe it’s different when Crowley does, sinking his teeth into the applesoft skin there and leaving a mark that he _knows _will last longer than it ever should. 

It’s different, it’s better, it’s electric fire and collapsing stars and new universes at once. It’s a hundred thousand metaphors that Crowley can’t think to encompass as Aziraphale parts his legs and buries kiss after kiss after kiss along the first-last thunderstorm of bruises that cloud the soft-exposed expanse of his throat. 

Crowley has had more dreams than he cares to count, more dreams imagining Aziraphale more ways than he could ever claim. More crashing tide-metaphors more images in the back of his mind, more fantasies about Rome and Greece and London and Berlin and Paris and every city they ever ran into each other in, and every city they didn’t. Every Arrangement deal that went swimmingly and every one that went poorly—Crowley had a fantasy for it. He had a fantasy for every moment, for every 2.19 _million _days they spent together before the end of the world. 

He’s thought about Aziraphale’s cockhead sliding wet and slick over him, he’s thought about what it would feel like to finally have him push inside him. To fuck him, to take him, to turn him inside out with nothing but the raw power of _want _and _desire. _

There was nothing to prepare him for what it would be like when Aziraphale hunches over him. When he pulls his head up and _kisses him _like it was all he ever needed. Like Crowley was the last withering piece of Eden, like he was the one desperate part of their past to cling to, like one hint that everything had once been alright and it might be again. 

When Aziraphale kisses him, sinking deep into his body, claiming every last inch of him for himself. 

It’s nothing but them. The world could fall away, it could burn to ash and rubble, the wind carry the sand of themselves to the turning oceans tide. Everything could crumble, but so long as there was a bed and Aziraphale, Crowley couldn’t give less of a fuck. This was all he ever wanted, this was all he ever needed. His worst desire and his greatest fear.

_Aziraphale. _

“Hush now, dear, I’ve got you.”

_Aziraphale._

“Oh, _Crowley.” _

It was better than dreams, it was better than anything he could’ve traded for this moment. Claws sliding over the expanse of his back (not leaving marks, never leaving marks like that. No beasts, no claws, no scratches). The drag and withdraw and push and drag of the hotslickslide of Aziraphale inside him, taking and giving in equal measure. Crowley buried his nose between the thrumpulse of his throat and the bruises he left on the base of his neck. 

“What do you need?” Aziraphale asks, pushing them up more to strike deeper, to find that place he’d sought out with his fingers and re-make the stars behind Crowley’s eyes. 

His entire body curls and craves and tenses and wants. “This, just—this.” And it’s what Aziraphale gives. He gives and gives until they meld together, the fracturing nature of their corporeal forms shivering and shuddering as completion threatens the edges of themselves. Aziraphale arches, pushing deeper as his wings stretch out and flicker, flapping, between the _there _and the _here. _

They settle on here, where Crowley can wrap a hand around the feathersoft juncture and pull him closer, can let the frozen edges of his Essence seep from the cracks of his facade and mingle with the golden-fire of Aziraphale’s, creating something new and burning and not unlike the distant blue-fire of burning nebula and stars as they inch ever closer. 

Closer, closer, until there is nothing between them, not even the light. 

When Crowley comes, it’s with Aziraphale close behind, shuddering between them with his legs hitched over his ribs and his teeth gritting against the bruising re-bruises of Aziraphale’s neck. 

He hadn’t even considered, in the darkest pitches of his shameful nights, the prospect of Aziraphale filling him. The feeling of his cockslide pushing deeper into him until he’s flooded with the heat of his completion—wrenching a wicked gasp from somewhere low in Crowley’s stomach. 

Fuck. Aziraphale shudders to a stop above him, one hand low on the small of Crowley’s back, the other still buried in his hair, keeping his face flush to his throat. 

“I love you.” 

It’s funny. Crowley had said the same thing, in some of his most shameful moments borrowing Aziraphale’s body. He’d whispered it, afraid that if he said it too loud the books might whisper it back when he was gone. He’d said it, in that voice, said it to himself in a hoarse needy whisper that wrenched itself around a sob. _I love you. _

_I love you. _

_I love you._

He’d said it in that voice, the same voice echoing in the hollows of himself. 

“I love you,” he says, in his own fuckwrecked voice. 

Aziraphale tips his chin up, a careful, slow, gesture. 

_This is real, _Crowley thinks, not for the first time and certainly not for the last. _This is very real. _

“It is, my love.” Aziraphale’s lips pull into a whip-wild grin, “very real indeed.”

**Author's Note:**

> So like -- this is also some self-indulgent nonsense. 
> 
> I'm on [Tumblr](https://tooeasilyconsidered.tumblr.com/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/hipsteroric)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] tangled up with you all night](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20584808) by [triedunture](https://archiveofourown.org/users/triedunture/pseuds/triedunture)


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